TWO WORLDS
For a month I’ve been bouncing back and forth between two worlds, both in my mind between the two sides of polarized America and in the car between rural and urban America where these two sides live.
Today Susie and I drove to the Ebbs Chapel Community Center in Madison County, not far from where she lives, to have a blackberry breakfast at their Blackberry Festival. She had heard of the Blackberry Festival over the years but had never been to the Ebbs Chapel Community Center where, besides the festival there are often musical events. Today in addition to breakfast there were booths selling home canned food and even a flea market. Everyone was cheerful and friendly and having a great time. For breakfast I had a biscuit with gravy on one half and blackberry jam on the other with orange juice and coffee and scrambled eggs.
We passed Trump signs on the way and a sign that simply said, Jesus, as if that were enough. I thought of Christian nationalism and the polarization that fundamentalism on both sides causes. Christian fundamentalism insists that the Bible is right and those that ignore the Bible are wrong.
But here at the Blackberry Festival and beside the road on the way to the Blackberry Festival I saw another kind of Christianity in action. I saw Christianity in action, not insisting on being right but loving your neighbor as yourself, as Jesus preached. Along the highway was an enormous pile, high and long, of cut up wood and beside it some logs that still needed splitting. And at the Blackberry Festival there was a booth of people who had photographs of the recipients of the wood and were collecting donations to help cover the costs of cutting the wood. The cut up wood we had seen was curing for the fireplaces of people who could not cut their own wood or afford to buy wood to heat with during the winter. Over 500 households, many with people my age, old people who could not longer keep their wood stoves burning, were going to have food from this huge pile delivered to their homes in preparation for the cold that was going to come.
If these people were Trump voters, and I bet most of them were, they were good loving and caring Christians taking care of their own. This was part of the driving force behind Christian nationalism that I have been missing and it demands hard work and sacrifice.
We left the Blackberry Festival and drove through the heavily forested mountains of Madison County, the source of this wood and the home to people whose ways of earning a living have been upended through changes in global economics which have made life harder through no fault of their own. Along the way we saw one field of tobacco where, fifty years ago there would have been mountain field after mountain field of tobacco which provided these mountain people a decent living. But the tobacco subsidies vanished and then market for tobacco and now tobacco is grown overseas. We saw barn after falling greying barn leaning toward collapse with no functional purpose. Mountain values also seem to be under threat. The mountains are beautiful to ride through as we did today. They attract tourists whose money goes to outside developers and outside franchises not to the people who live here.
A sign of this was Interstate 26 which crossed our road far above us. The traffic that used to come along the road that we were driving along, the old main twisty road from Asheville to Tennessee, has been bypassed and all the stores and restaurants that depended upon this travel have closed, except for one upscale cafe which was aimed at people like us or people from Mars Hill close by where we had delicious biscuits and gravy and blackberry jam. The Interstate gives easy access for the mountain folks living along it to the outside world, but it is also as if the outside world is passing these people by. And they don’t like it.
But I found out today that in addition to being angry and believing, what I believe to be Trump’s false promise to save them, these people at the Blackberry Festival were good, friendly, kind people and caring Christians which leaves me as unsettled about how to get out of polarization as I have been all along.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 